Gavin Sullivan, The Law of the List: UN Counterterrorism Sanctions and the Politics of Global Security Law

Abstract

Grappling with the sanctions list at the Security Council confounds international legal scholars. The list fits none of our well-rehearsed paradigms. Attempts to assess the List for legitimacy, for human rights compliance, for due process often neglects the individuals throughout the world whose lives are completely changed. This is the Security Council’s and its members’ great success: they constructed a legal no-place seemingly beyond assessment. Sullivan’s achievement is in reconstructing our frames of analysis and enabling a much clearer view of what is occurring in this hitherto void space. The Law of the List does this through several means. Sullivan bypasses the tripwires of traditional international and domestic legal analysis and begins with what is happening on a daily basis. The book brings a range of methodologies—scale, genealogy, empiricism, non-legality, assemblages—to bare on the List. In the introduction, Sullivan discusses working for listed individuals as a practitioner and this makes...